Enterprise information technology (IT) systems often are used to manage and process business data. To do so, a business enterprise may use various application programs running on one or more enterprise IT systems. Application programs may be used to process business transactions, such as taking and fulfilling customer orders and providing supply chain and inventory management. Separate application programs working independent of each other may be linked via asynchronous messages that are periodically exchanged. Sometimes a problem occurs in the transfer of data from one application program to another application program. More particularly, sometimes data sent from one application program to another application program is not able to be accepted and/or processed by the receiving application program.
One approach to handling errors in received data is for the receiving system to send the data back to the sending system, often with an indication that an error has been detected by the receiving system. However, a user of the sending system may not be capable of understanding or correcting the error. This may be particularly true when correcting the error requires a change to be made on the receiving system. By way of example, when an enterprise IT system includes a sales system and a financial system, the sales system may send data to the financial system, which is only capable of accepting data that passes particular types of validity checks and other types of data consistency checks. When data received by the financial system does not pass the data consistency checks, an error occurs in the financial system and a message describing the error and/or the received data is returned to the sales system for error handling. However, a user of the sales system may not understand or be capable of correcting the error without access to the financial system. For example, an error may be generated if the financial system is sent data for a time period that has been closed in the financial system. The error could be fixed by reopening the time period in the financial system, which the user of the sales system is not able to do. As another example, an error may be generated if cost center information is incorrect or missing in the financial system, which the user of the sales system cannot fix. In such a case, one approach is to have a user of the sales system call or otherwise communicate with a user of the financial system who is able to fix the financial system conditions from which the error resulted. Then the user of the sales system resends the data to the financial system for processing.
Another approach for handling errors in data received from another system is have a user monitor the receipt of the data. Using the receiving system, the user interactively corrects errors that occur.